In Brief: Land is the new Oil

Land-grabbing by corporations and those in power at national level continues to rob people’s livelihoods and create new conflicts, with land rights being systematically violated.

Details

For generations, around 2.5 billion farmers and members of indigenous peoples have used more than half of the world’s terrestrial area (RRI, 2015). While they hold legitimate rights to the land, they are usually unable to prove this, for example with title deeds. This state of affairs has often been taken advantage of both by foreign investors and by those in power at national level to take possession of large tracts of land – a practice that is rightly referred to as ‘land-grabbing’.